Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/187

180 times not a little curious. The well-known habit of jotting down annotations on the margin of the books he read, has made Samuel Taylor Coleridge's admirers anxious to see specimens: and here we are gratified with a sprinkling. That habit has been alluded to by various writers, in terms calculated to excite considerable expectations. De Quincey, for instance, says, "Coleridge often spoiled a book; but, in the course of doing this, he enriched that book with so many and so valuable notes, tossing about him with such lavish profusion, from such a cornucopia of discursive reading, and such a fusing intellect, commentaries so many-angled and so many-colourcd, that I have envied many a man whose luck has placed him in the way of such injuries; and that man most have been a churl (though, God knows! too often this churl has existed) who could have found in his heart to complain." And Charles Lamb—to cite one other witness of experience—counsels those who have books to lend, and the heart to lend them, to "let it be to such a one as S. T. C.; he will return them with usury, enriched with annotations tripling their value. I have had experience. Many arc these precious MSS, of his—(in matter sometimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals)—in no very clerkly hand—legible in my Daniel, in old Burton, in Sir Thomas Browne, &c. I counsel thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library against S. T. C." Such testimony makes the mouth water with anticipation. But it must be confessed that not in matter, still less in quantity, do the present marginalia correspond to such a note of preparation. However, the reader shall judge of the quality by one or two excerpts from the scanty sum-total.

The following strictures on Hartley's manner, refer to certain remarks upon allegorical and pastoral poetry, in the biography of Lord Fairfax:

"It is this petulant ipse dixit smartness and dogmatism, in which, as in a certain mannerism—a sudden jerkiness in the mood, and unexpectedness of phrase—something between wit and oddity, but with the latter predominant, the peculiarity certain, the felicity doubtful—he has caught Southey's manner (the only things which he might not profitably have taken from his maternal aunt’s husband), that annoy and mortify me in Hartley's writings."

Again: in the life of William Congreve, the old dramatist, Heywood, being characterised en passant as "the prose Shakspeare," we find the old gentleman again taking his son to task:

"This note has less of Hartley's tact and discrimination than, from such a subject, I should have expected. [Quite the "governor."] Surely a prose Shakspeare is not only an over-load for old Heywood, but something not very unlike a square circle." [Coleridge all over.]

Hartley's castigation of Dr. Johnson, for his "uncharitable piece of special pleading" against the memory of Congreve, is applauded as follows:

"Very sensible. I could wish to have preserved a lively and spirited conclusion of one of my courses of lectures, on the sycophancy and cynic assentation of Dr, Johnson, both as a critic and a moralist, and most singly as a critico-moral biographer, to the plebeian envy of the patrician mediocres and the reading public."

Hartley, having laughed at Congreve's thought of confining a novel to